Pay for It

Choose what you want and then pay for it.

—Robert Bly

I’ve chosen. There’s no

doubt about it. I’m rooted

in this coastal town

where spring begins in January,

acacias bursting into chrome yellow

clusters, spiking the air with their

sharp scent. I am here

with my hands in the dirt,

yanking out crab grass,

planting a lemon tree.

You are shoveling snow—

or I picture you that way. Maybe

you have paid a boy to do it

and are walking through the cleared

path to your car. No. The car

is in the garage. This shows

how little I really know.

Do you remember those mornings—scraping ice

off the windshield, the car so frigid.

And the time you plowed into a snowbank just

as you hit the high notes

of “On the Street Where You Live.”

I could have abandoned the car,

checked into the motel at the ramp’s end

and never left. Or stayed right there,

frozen gladly, my mouth

fused to yours, an ice sculpture.

I do know in the evenings you make a fire.

You wrote that in a letter.

We make fires too when the nights get cold.

Well, not cold, of course, but my boy

likes a fire. And Janet.

They poke the logs, watching embers

spray, lit fountains in the night.

And you are reading. Your wife,

on the couch beside you,

reads a line aloud from Middlemarch.

Soon you’ll place bookmarks and

go upstairs. I’ve seen your room

with its sloping ceiling. Your bed.

I won’t imagine more.

Soon I will read to my child,

rub my face in the warm curve of his neck.

Janet’s dragged the garbage to the curb

and calls me out to the crescent moon.

I can see it from the window,

thin as frost. When I go to her

we will lean together like horses.

I have made my choice. Still

there are mornings when I wake, my lips

swollen from your kisses,

my body bruised and fragrant

as grasses on which lions have lain,

and for a full bereft moment, I cannot,

for the life of me, remember

why I left.